Sing to Me
by heartswells
Summary: [A collection of song-inspired drabbles for various relationships in Hetalia.] Summary for the Current Update: Arthur was the manifestation of Mathew's most malicious nightmares, yet he was incapable of of abandoning his lover. [Canada/England]
1. Wales & NZ

For the purpose of this piece, I am portraying New Zealand as non-binary and using they/them/they're pronouns.

* * *

_Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby - Cigarettes After Sex_

"When the liquor tastes sweet, you know you're drowning." The observation swirled across the flesh of Wales' pale lips like cigarette smoke, whimsically coiling in New Zealand's ears before its noise diminished in the pub's noxious atmosphere.

"Does your ale taste sweet?" Intoxicated and exhausted by drink, the inquiry contained no inflection, and New Zealand neglected to reveal whether they voiced it in jest, concern, or sincerity. They pressed the damp, flushed flesh of their cheek into Wales' shoulder as they awaited his answer, allowing the old, scratchy material to chafe the tender skin.

"No." Wales, his body a testament to the vast age of civilization, had witnessed many great men deteriorate over the bottle. Cowering beneath hopelessness, kings, priests, lovers, fathers, and heroes alike had latched to bottles as a babe to its mother. He had witnessed desperate men fool themselves into believing the burn of whiskey was equivalent to the heat of a lover's kiss. Eventually, life became more bitter than liquor, and men praised their ale as sweeter than their living days, but never should it be worshiped as so. Never should self destruction be palatable.

"You taste sweet to me," he whispered, leaning into the matted curls of New Zealand's head, allowing his lips to ruffled the greasy, sweaty strands. His lover's kiss was self-destruction, sweet, addicting, and arbitrary, yet Wales submitted to the falsity of romance. He brewed alcohol from his lover's blood and subjected himself to poisoning.

* * *

Author's Note: A massive thank you to the wonderful Maddeline Bonnefoy-Kirkland for granting me the confidence to begin posting drabbles with her kindness. This is just a small drabble series to allow me to branch out from all these ED stories; they were becoming a tad stressful.


	2. England & Canada

_The Blur, the Line, and the Thickest of Onions - Little Comets_

Arthur was the materialization of malice. Borne of the vehement passion shared between a tempest and a maelstrom, he was composed of catastrophe and wrath. He was toxic with opiates and led rushing through his veins. His kiss was corrosive; his embrace was constrictive; his endearments were lethal. Abhorrently selfish and hideously violent, to look upon him seared the eyes and inflicted a harrowing blindness. He was a barbarian and a conqueror, incapable of forsaking his desires and comprehending consequence.

However, damned by the laws of life to be multifaceted and enigmatic, he often behaved contrary to his most maleficent traits. He fussed, and he chuckled; he sang, and he praised. Attentive to detail he memorized all of Matthew's quirks and pleasures, wielding the knowledge to frivolously spoil him. Magnificent fairytales spilled from his tongue, constructing imaginary lands as glorious as the emeralds sparkling in his eyes and sweeping Matthew away with wondrous dreams. With sincerity, he doted and kissed.

Nevertheless, he was a tyrant and tyrants are invariably incapable of love. Poised with the callousness of a commander, he shunned Mathew's touch with his rigidness. Under the animalistic law of imperialism, Arthur had learned that control was synonymous for passion. He rejected Matthew's emotions as a ploy of manipulation and accused him of attempting to force him into vulnerability so that Matthew may destroy him. He believed mistrust and anger were characteristics of love, thus he believed it was an act or ardor when he became Mathew's most terrible nightmare. And Matthew accepted this cruelty, for Matthew had never learned that he deserved to expect anything more.


	3. De-Anon: Lincoln & America

**DE-ANON:**

America, Ensemble - Everyone Else Sees Lincoln's Ghost

Lots of residents of and visitors to the White House have claimed to see the ghost of Abraham Lincoln (including, famously, Winston Churchill just after getting out of the bath). A fair number of nations are among them- but when they mention the sightings to America, he gets uncharacteristically tight-lipped. Of course, America usually just doesn't like ghosts, so the other nations shrug it off.

The truth is the whole situation is very upsetting to America. He stayed in to nap on the night of the assassination and never really said a proper good-bye, but he's never seen the ghost or felt its presence. Why does everyone else get to see him and not the nation he mattered to the most?

* * *

The United States of America was abolished with the Great Secession Winter, for a mutilated, fragmented nation was not a nation, and thus he, as the United States of America, was rendered inexistent. Nor was he the Union or the Confederacy, for he could not simultaneously embody two identities that maimed and murdered one another. He was neither nation nor soldier; he was mere flesh for feasting upon as useless as the men festering with gangrene on the battlefields. His heart palpitated with the firing of guns, and he begged god to save him, but he did not know to which god he begged.

_"A house divided against itself cannot stand."_ He was unable to march alongside his own, for he had no own to march with. He could not sympathize with his inexistent people. His cracked lips whispered North or South; abolition and emancipation or the right to property; state rights or federal rights? He floundered beneath turmoil, unable to maintain a belief when his nation could not. He was delirious and derailed from reality. Who was the United States of America? What did he fight for? It didn't matter; he didn't exist.

Lincoln invariably referred to him as the United States of America. Poised and somber, he enunciated each word of the nation's title as if they were composed of polished brass. He believed in the perseverance of an _existing_ union. He believed in the power of the United States of America, and thus he treated Alfred with the reverence of the America he believed in. Equally, Alfred never called him Abe; to the United States of America, he was President Lincoln, the man that upheld him when he could not uphold himself.

_"If there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions."_ In the trenches of the Western Front, in the skies of the Pacific Theater, and in the thickets of Vietnam, he fought for President Lincoln. For by maintaining faith in the unity of his nation as brothers slaughtered brothers, Lincoln had been the blood that allowed Alfred's heart to beat again.

When Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1856, Alfred felt as though his identity had been shattered once again. His president, his leader, his stability, and his father had been murdered by John Wilkes Booth, yet _both_ the assassinator and the assassinated were the breadth and blood of America with divergent beliefs poisoning his harmony. He wondered who the United States of America was and what he believed in. Maybe, he would never know.

Akin to every human to grace Alfred's life, President Lincoln was wrenched from his hands without word or closure. Lincoln was simply gone, as if he had never existed. Claims of Lincoln's presence roaming the White House sporadically arose, even among the nations. However, when others inquired about it, he dug his teeth and his nails into his flesh until crimson iron flowed.

He had sobbed, begged, prayed, and demanded that Lincoln reveal himself to him. Through wars and massacres he had _needed_ him, needed a leader and adviser who _believed_ in the United States of America. He never arrived. Was he angry with Alfred? Had Alfred failed to become the United States of America that Lincoln had warred for? Had Lincoln never cared for him?

_Or did Lincoln, like Alfred, not know who he was?_


End file.
